For its first six months of existence, the minority government of Dalton McGuinty at Queen’s Park was a rather drab affair, absent the jockeying and horse-trading and feverish election speculation that defined the seven years of minority rule in Ottawa that ended last spring.

But an anxious couple of weeks of budget negotiations against the backdrop of whether an Liberal-NDP deal would keep the government alive reached a dramatic peak on Friday with the appointment of long-time Tory MPP Elizabeth Witmer to a Liberal patronage post — raising the possibility that Mr. McGuinty could turn his whisker-thin minority into a majority with an upcoming by-election win.

A statement announcing Ms. Witmer’s nomination to the chair of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, where she would take over for departing chair Steve Mahoney, who retired in March, made no mention of the political intrigue surrounding the move.

“Elizabeth Witmer is exceptionally qualified to be the Chair of the WSIB,” said Mr. McGuinty’s statement issued Friday afternoon, noting that the former Minister of Labour and Deputy Premier under the PC government of Mike Harris “will bring strong leadership to the WSIB board.”

But beyond filling a bureaucratic vacancy, Ms. Witmer’s resignation from the Ontario legislature puts a lot at stake in a yet-to-be-called by-election in her former riding of Kitchener-Waterloo, and raises new questions about PC leader Tim Hudak’s decision to effectively recuse himself from the recent budget negotiations by signalling his party’s intention to vote against it on the day it was tabled.

Mr. McGuinty’s Liberals have 52 seats at Queen’s Park, excluding Speaker Dave Levac, who only votes in case of a tie. The PCs now have 36 seats, down one from election day in October, and the NDP under Andrea Horwath have 17 seats — giving the opposition a combined 53 seats. A Liberal by-election win would even things out and allow the Speaker to cast deciding votes in the event of a split, meaning Mr. McGuinty would be returned to a majority-government situation.

A Liberal win, though, is far from assured. Ms. Witmer held Kitchener-Waterloo for the PCs for 22 years, and took 43% of the vote in the fall election to Liberal candidate Eric Davis’s 36%. There has already been speculation that Ms. Witmer’s son, Scott, will attempt to keep the riding in family hands. All parties will throw considerable resources into a by-election, and the recent rise of the NDP in polls, thanks in part to Ms. Horwath’s conciliatory approach to the budget, could end up hurting the Liberals.

It is a strategy that worked well for Jack Layton — get out front and oppose the government, and let someone else decide whether to keep it alive

Even if Mr. McGuinty is unable to regain his majority, the loss of Ms. Witmer is a blow to the Hudak PCs. A former cabinet minister in four different portfolios, she ran unsuccessfully in the 2002 leadership race to succeed Mr. Harris, losing to Ernie Eves. She supported Christine Elliott in the 2009 race to replace John Tory that Mr. Hudak won, but remained a key figure in the party. Her resignation will fuel speculation that members of the PC caucus are troubled by the leader’s decision to sit on the sidelines while Mr. McGuinty and Ms. Horwath hammered out a budget deal that includes a new 2% tax on the super-rich.

The Liberals sent a note to party supporters on Thursday that highlighted various criticisms of the Hudak strategy in the media, including a Globe and Mail editorial that accused him of “narrow, political self-interest” and a Toronto Star story that quoted an unnamed PC insider who lamented that Mr. Hudak had made himself irrelevant “for weeks.” It even cited an unflattering editorial in the Blue Mountains Courier Herald, up in what now must be considered the Tory heartland.

Though the events of Friday have put Mr. Hudak’s tactics under greater scrutiny, there was some logic to them. He is the opposition leader, and faced with a budget that promised to return to balance five years from now thanks largely to uncertain measures that would restrain spending growth, he opposed it. His alternative was to enter into an awkward give-and-take with Mr. McGuinty that would have ended with his party effectively giving the Liberal plan its blessing. By refusing to do that, Mr. Hudak is able to keep on not endorsing it. It is a strategy that worked well for Jack Layton in Ottawa’s minority era — get out front and oppose the government of the day, and let someone else decide whether to keep it alive. When Mr. Layton campaigned last spring by saying his NDP was the true opposition, the man had a point.

Mr. Hudak, moreover, knows the news is likely to get worse before it gets better for the Liberals. Two credit-rating agencies downgraded their outlooks for Ontario this week, the province has announced another planned increase to electricity rates, and Mr. McGuinty appears on the brink of protracted labour fights with the doctors and teachers who were once stalwart allies. There’s also a longer-term risk that the rosy forecasts of Finance Minister Dwight Duncan do not come to pass. Jim Flaherty, who as it happened met with the Post’s editorial board on Friday, said he had had particular concerns over the Liberal pledge to keep growth in health spending restricted to 2%, when it has grown at almost three times that rate in recent years.

“I’m not being critical of that,” Mr. Flaherty said, somewhat unexpectedly. “I’m just saying it’s a big challenge… and the political cost will be high. Fortitude will be required.”

With the Liberals poised to wade into that mess, the Hudak strategy of staying out of it was obvious: wait for the problems to grow, and when the next election comes, argue that he had nothing to do with them.

It’s a plan, though, that was contingent on the chance to force an election that just passed not being the only one Mr. Hudak will get.

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